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Breakfast Meat Cakes

A savory breakfast dish of finely chopped cold meat mixed with egg, butter, milk, and seasonings, formed into balls and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Breakfast Meat Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cold meat finely.

  2. In a bowl, combine the chopped meat, egg, melted butter, milk, pepper, and salt.

  3. Roll the mixture into balls.

Cook

  1. Fry the balls in a pan with a little lard until golden brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Meat + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,703 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cold meat
Forms the main body of the cakes and provides their savory flavor.
Egg
Binds the chopped meat together so the cakes hold their shape.
Milk
Adds moisture so the cakes stay tender rather than dry.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richer flavor and helps the surface brown during frying.

The step that matters

Frying the balls until golden brown. The mixture is held together only by egg and is already cooked meat, so it can crumble or dry out if the heat is too high. Moderate heat with a little lard lets the outside brown while the center warms through and stays moist.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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